Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are so valuable to the business model and circulation of the British tabloids that the outlets won’t stop writing about and attacking them.
Despite the couple’s increasing willingness to resort to lawsuits—which they have a habit of winning—in an attempt to silence their critics, industry insiders have told The Daily Beast the tabloids are more likely to react by doubling down on their aggressive coverage.
On Wednesday, Harry fired off the latest threat from his Californian home, suing their old enemy, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the publishers of the Mail on Sunday, for libel. Although Harry’s team have declined to say what the case is about, The Daily Beast was told by sources that the action was connected to a story that appeared in last week’s Mail on Sunday which accused Harry of trying to keep secret his legal action against the British government, and issuing a misleading account of events when he said, in a press release, that he would pay for that protection himself.
ADVERTISEMENT
ANL have declined to comment beyond confirming Harry has filed a suit against them, but The Daily Beast understands they are confident about their story.
A skeptical observer would note, of course, that ANL said they were confident about their story reproducing Meghan’s handwritten letter to her father, which was subsequently ruled to be an invasion of her privacy. They were also confident about a story saying Harry had “turned his back” on his old military associations, for which they later apologized. Harry and Meghan have also won privacy battles against LA photo agencies Splash News and X17.
That Harry is now launching an enigmatic libel case about a legal action is an all-too potent signifier of what seems to be an addiction on the part of the Montecito Mountbatten-Windsors to filing lawsuits.
Their primary targets are their hated enemies: the media. They also have a phone hacking complaint in train against the publishers of the Mirror and the now-defunct News of the World.
The new action is, prima facie, a complex case, and it is therefore unlikely the general public will give over much energy to trying to understand Harry’s latest beef with the Mail. As one former senior British tabloid newspaper editor told The Daily Beast: “This latest action is so obscure you have to read the story three times to figure out what he is complaining about.”
Referring to the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where John Cleese and his comrades have a petty argument about the exact name of their fledgling political party, the executive said: “It’s Popular People’s Front of Judea stuff.”
There is little doubt in the minds of reporters and editors, however, that the intention behind the repeated legal actions is to persuade news editors and proprietors that it is not worth the hassle of running negative stories about Harry and Meghan.
The strategy —described to The Daily Beast by media lawyer Mark Stephens of international law firm Howard Kennedy as “reach for your lawyer at the slightest provocation”—stands in stark contrast to the once-hallowed royal tradition of simply brushing off and ignoring inaccurate newspaper stories.
Indeed, Queen Elizabeth only sued a newspaper for the first time in 1983, after a Buckingham Palace kitchen worker, Kieran Kenny, sold his story to The Sun. The queen got an injunction against The Sun after the first day of Kenny’s revelations, leading Sun readers to be denied the following day’s installment, trailed as: “How barefoot Di buttered my toast.”
“There used to be approximately one royal lawsuit per decade,” says Stephens, “In the last five years it has seemed more like a deluge.”
Stephens refers to cases such as the queen suing The Sun when it published her Christmas speech in advance in 1993, and Charles suing the Mail on Sunday for publishing excerpts from his diary in 2006 in which he described Chinese leaders as “appalling old waxworks”.
Of course, it is not just Harry and Meghan who have found their litigious side. Arguably, the tone of the younger generation’s aggressive interaction with the media was set by William and Kate when Kate sued the French magazine Closer for publishing pictures of her sunbathing topless 10 years ago.
The Closer case was a line in the sand, and their €100,000 victory in a French court was notification that the young royals wouldn’t allow their privacy to be invaded without protest in the way their parents' and grandparents’ generation had.
In 2020, Kate threatened legal action against the magazine Tatler for publishing a story that said she had become “perilously thin” and criticized her family’s non-aristocratic background. Tatler withdrew the piece and the matter went no further.
The source of the animus for both Harry and William is, of course, the death of their mother while being chased by paparazzi.
They have both been very clear about who they blame. In his famously candid interview with ITV's Tom Bradby in Africa that presaged him leaving the royal family, Harry said, “I will not be bullied into playing a game that killed my mum.”
He also said the flashes of paparazzi bulbs take him “straight back” to the death of Diana, saying “Every single time I see a camera, every single time I hear a click, every single time I see a flash it takes me straight back, so in that respect it’s the worst reminder of her life as opposed to the best.”
Despite the aggressive stance the young royals have taken, the irony is that the last decade has seen a global explosion in royal coverage. The reality is that the odds of the Daily Mail changing tack now are extremely close to zero.
Indeed, one Mail insider told The Daily Beast: “The Mail is on a crusade against Harry and Meghan, and these legal actions will only make ANL even more determined to keep it going. Harry and Meghan are the couple the readers love to hate, they are copy, and the lawsuits are just a business expense. Look at how much the Mail got out of the case [about the letter]. It really damaged Meghan’s reputation in the U.K. and although ANL lost the case, the editor of the Mail on Sunday who published that letter, Ted Verity, got promoted. That tells you everything you need to know.”
The former tabloid executive made a similar point, saying: “There are some people who try and operate this scorched earth policy to stop people writing about them, and for someone who is relatively low-profile it sometimes works. Reporters and desks just think why bother? But for Prince Harry to try and achieve a lower profile via suing people is just absurd. People are always going to want to read about him. It might make ANL more careful about the wording, and maybe this time they have made a mistake on the wording of whether it was secret or not secret, but ultimately if Harry wears a silly hat in a public place they are going to take the piss out of him. They are not going to slip up on something like that.”
Harry knows that he represents too important a part of the media’s business plan for them to stop writing about him.
Indeed, as Harry told an online symposium last year: “I learned from a very early age the incentives of publishing are not necessarily aligned with the incentives of truth… My experience is being more pre-social media around the U.K. press who sadly conflate profit with purpose and news with entertainment.”
The larger war with the media is one the Sussexes probably know they can never win, but the inconvenient fact for the newspapers is that they do keep emerging victorious in the individual battles.
As Stephens says, “They are doing rather well. They keep winning. Privacy law is an area that had been slowly developing over the past five to 10 years. The Sussexes have put booster rockets under it.”
